ress ball, to which all
her guests were obliged to come in the costumes of Old California, and
laughed for a week at the ridiculous figure which most of them cut. She
also gave many dinners and breakfasts, kettle-drums and theatre parties,
and, altogether, managed to amuse herself and others. She never
mentioned Trennahan to Magdalena. Nor did he write. The Pacific might
have been climbing over him, for any sign he gave.

XXV

It was midnight, and Magdalena was still awake; a storm raged,
prohibitive of sleep. The wind screamed over the hills, tearing the long
ribbons of rain to bits and flinging them in great handfuls against the
windows; from which they rebounded to the porch to skurry down the pipes
and gurgle into the pools of the soaked ground below. The roar of the
ocean bore aloft another sound, a long heavy groan,--the fog-horn of the
Farallones. Magdalena imagined the wild scene beyond the Golden Gate:
the ships driven out of their course, bewildered by the fog, the loud
unceasing rattle of the rigging, the hungry boom of the breakers, the
mountains and caverns of the raging Pacific. Her mind, open to
impressions once more, stirred as it had not during its period of
subservience to the heart, and toward expression. Suffering had not
worked those wonders with her literary faculty of which she had read;
but she certainly wrote with something more of fluency, something less
of attenuated commonplace. She had finished her first story; and
although it by no means satisfied her, she had passed on to the next,
determined to write them all; then, with the education accruing from
long practice, to go back to the beginnings and make them literature.
To-night she forgot her stories and lay wondering at the ghostly images
rolling through her brain, breaking upon the wall which stood between
themselves and speech,--hurled back to rise and form again. What did it
mean? Was some dumb dead poet trying to speak through her brain,
inextricably caught in the folds of her ravening intelligence before
recognising its fatal limitations? Or was that intelligence but the half
of another, divided out there in eternity before being sucked
earthwards? It was seldom that such fancies came to her nowadays, but
to-night the storm shrieked with a thousand voices, no one of which was
unfamiliar to these ghosts in her mind. She had heard the expression
"hell let loose" variously applied. Were those the souls of old and
wicked mates t